A gateway product, such as a firewall, performs many important functions. One important function is policy enforcement. Policy enforcement performed by a gateway product may include, for examples, source verification, destination verification, user authentication, anti-virus, content scanning, content detection, and intrusion detection.
Because much resource is utilized by firewalls to perform policy enforcement, existing firewalls may not have the necessary resource to provide management services, such as log analysis and report generation, web GUI for management, and cross-validation of configuration parameters. In some cases, the firewall is not even set up to provide management services or certain functions requested by a user. Although a separate device from the firewall may be used to provide certain functions not available from the firewall, such separate device is usually not associated with the firewall, and access of such device may require an administrator to manually perform a log-on procedure. As such, use of such separate device is inconvenient.